Pipeline: archive shot → doodle cartoon

One shot is one folder, shots/<category>/, and one state file, shot.json. Every stage reads files from that folder and writes new files to it; every page is a view of those files. Stages are numbered so a ledger line can say where a repair went back to.

Two lanes have been tried, and the pipeline joins them:

• Look lane (batches/2026-10-20-selected-drawings): an image model draws four strong still keys per subject in the doodle's identity, reviewed by fresh critics. Good drawing; no motion; the background is redrawn on every key.
• Motion lane (shots/giraffe-walks-past): a vector rig keyed by the agent over SAM silhouettes, in-betweened with planted feet, laid out on six depth planes under the measured camera. Real motion and measurable tests; the drawing is weaker.
• The join is stage 5: trace look-lane keys into strokes (tools/trace_keys.py), then fit the motion lane's rig to them. Tracing works (recall 0.99, every ink piece kept, across all 40 keys). Holding the background does not yet: separate character and background drawing is required.

The two lanes, measured on one scale (20 Oct 2026)

tools/style_score.py simplifies any drawing the way Quick, Draw! simplified its own data, then compares six stroke statistics with real doodles of the category (data/lane_compare.json):

• The motion lane (giraffe shot) has about the right number of strokes but lines that turn too often and run too long between points: the rig's wobble reads as jitter.
• The look lane (traced giraffe, cat, duck keys) has lines that turn like a person's but three to seven standard deviations too many strokes.
• So the join keeps the look lane's line and the motion lane's stroke budget: fit the rig to the trace, then redraw each rig part as one traced stroke.

tools/match_strokes.py gives the look lane its first motion: keys aligned by translation, strokes matched key to key, matched strokes interpolated and the rest swapped at the midpoint (test T3). Both lanes play side by side with their footage in pages/projector.html.

Every subject, redrawn the giraffe way (20 Oct 2026)

tools/puppet.py does by hand, for each subject, what Giraffe Walks Past did: the chosen Quick, Draw! doodle itself (every stroke kept) gets a few joints, the agent places those joints on the footage at each key (tools/look.py gives a gridded key sheet), bones carry the strokes by linear blend skinning, in-betweens interpolate the joints with planted contacts, and the background is drawn once. Then tools/shot_tests.py runs the shot tests and tools/critic_packet.py makes a blind packet: a fresh critic sees eight frames of the cartoon only, names what it is, and then judges identity against the doodle.

What happened, across ten subjects:

• T3 and B1, the look lane's two failures, pass everywhere, by construction: one doodle, one plate.
• Eight of ten critics named the subject from the cartoon alone. The dog was read as a goose (a side-view doodle cannot turn to face the camera) and the giraffe close-up as a horse head (the crop hides the ossicones).
• Five of ten kept the doodle's identity in the critic's eyes (cat, giraffe, bicycle, windmill, helicopter): the rigid subjects and the faces. The animals that bend (dog, duck, rabbit, horse, butterfly) lost it, because two-point bones stretch strokes they should only turn.
• M2 is capped by the doodle that was chosen: the look lane picked several drawings that are themselves atypical (dog 7, windmill 4, butterfly 12 percentile at rest). Choosing the doodle should check M2 first.
• Only the windmill's motion read as continuous; most strips jumped where a key changed scale or facing. The strip skips frames, so this needs a playback review before it counts.
• M1 (classifier) did not run: the browser pane did not respond. M3 used GrabCut, not SAM, and is weak.

Where learning comes in

Nothing has been trained yet. What exists is search: an agent proposes, tests and critics judge, the ledger keeps every attempt. That is the data a learner would need:

1. Pose from silhouette. Each accepted key is a pair (footage frame + SAM mask → rig pose). With a few hundred pairs per body plan (quadruped, bird, vehicle), a small model can propose keys that the agent then corrects; the corrections are the next round's data.
2. Preference over repairs. Each ledger line holds a before, an after and a critic verdict. Those are preference pairs for a reward model over drawings, scored together with the measured tests, not instead of them. The classifier alone is a misleading reward: it accepts traced silhouettes.
3. In-betweening. Accepted shots give dense key → in-between sequences in one topology, which is what a learned in-betweener needs. Until then inbetween.py is the baseline to beat.

Training starts when a pair set exists that a fresh critic has approved at playback speed. Still-key approval alone does not make a pair train-eligible.

Tests

Current tests, as shots/giraffe-walks-past/tests.py computes them, plus the two the join adds:

Lessons that set these bars:

• A test can pass by measuring nothing. The first foot-slide test found no planted frames and passed; it now fails with fewer than four planted intervals.
• A number can pass while the drawing gets worse. Forcing one leg length passed the proportion test and crumpled the legs. Every numeric pass is followed by looking at the frames.
• Precision of the tracer is 1.0 by construction (traced lines sit on ink); recall and parts_kept are the informative numbers. parts_kept exists because recall stayed at 0.85 while a cat's eye was missing.

Scaling to more drawings

• Wave 1 (done to stage 5): rabbit, duck, horse, dog, cat, butterfly, bicycle, windmill, helicopter, giraffe. Giraffe is through stage 10 as a full shot.
• Wave 2 (queued): the next ten categories with a moving subject, by archive match score, in data/subject_queue.json. A high score only means the archive search found a likely shot.
• One agent per subject, run with AGENTS.md; critics are separate agents with fresh context.
• Body plans are shared: a quadruped rig serves dog, horse, cow, pig and raccoon. Build a rig once per body plan, then key many subjects with it.